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Workers World to FARC-EP:

Uribe, Bush are the real criminals

Published Mar 5, 2008 9:55 PM

The massacre committed by the Colombian military forces on March 1st in Ecuador where Raúl Reyes, the member of the secretariat of the FARC-EP in charge of international relations and a key figure in the negotiations for the prisoners exchange, was killed, has prompted the rupture of relations of both Ecuador and Venezuela with neighboring Colombia.

The massacre, which was carried out with a high-tech intelligence operation aided by the United States, is a grave violation of international law and a serious blow to the humanitarian exchange that is seen as the road to peace in Colombia. As a consequence, Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa recalled the Ecuadorian ambassador in Colombia, ordered the expulsion of the Colombian ambassador in Ecuador, and sent 3,200 troops to the border with Colombia. He has also been calling the presidents of several Latin American countries to plan a strategy in order to avoid the internationalization of the Colombian conflict and the impunity of this massacre.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez in turn, stating that the Colombian government has turned into the biggest threat against the peoples of Latin America, cautioned Colombian President Álvaro Uribe not to invade Venezuelan space. He also broke relations with Colombia, closing down the Venezuelan Embassy in Bogotá and sending 10 battalions with a total of 8,000 troops to the border.

The massacre is an intensification of the U.S. plans of war and destabilization, particularly against Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia. President Chávez and others have described the role of Colombia as “the Israel of Latin America.” The increasing threat against Venezuela is highlighted by the declarations of the Venezuelan former vice president, José Vicente Rangel. He said that “in the last few weeks there have been important deployments of Colombian military units on the border with Venezuela.”  (See related article by Miguel Urbano Rodrigues on page 11.)

Workers World sent the following message to the Revolutionary Forces of Colombia—Peoples’ Army on March 4:

To the Secretariat and members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia—Peoples’ Army (FARC-EP):

Please accept our most sincere and heartfelt condolences upon the death of the heroic Raúl Reyes, the revolutionary musician Julián Conrado and other revolutionaries vilely murdered by the Colombian government which, placing its thirst for blood and paramilitary violence above the cry for peace and the search for a humanitarian agreement among the Colombian people, invaded the neighboring country of Ecuador, raining bombs and cowardly executing, with the aid of the U.S. government, this group of insurgent forces.

This has been an immense blow against the peace process in the suffering country named Colombia, a process materializing through the humanitarian exchange the FARC-EP was advancing with so much openness and generosity with the diligent assistance of Colombian Senator Piedad Córdoba and Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, both of whom have been working for true peace and justice in the region.

From inside the monster, the United States, we send the message that we will continue to advance the proposition that the name of the FARC-EP should be eliminated from the terrorist list and that the FARC-EP’s character as a belligerent force fighting for peace and social justice be recognized. In Colombia it has been proven—by the extermination of the Patriotic Union (UP) and as the government and the Colombian army and its paramilitary collaborators continue their selective murders and arrests of union leaders, farmers, students and human-rights activists and the forced displacements of Indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities—that the peaceful social struggle in Colombia has been condemned to death by paramilitary state terrorism.

We will also attempt to expose to public opinion the real international terrorists: the paramilitary administration of Álvaro Uribe Vélez, for its multiple crimes against Colombian civil society, and the administration of George W. Bush, for the criminal wars waged, like those carried out against the peoples of Afghanistan and Iraq, and its warlike intervention all over the world at the price of thousands of innocent lives and global destabilization. And in Colombia in particular, where the U.S. applies its Plan Colombia, the armed wing of the “Free” Trade Agreements, designed not to combat drug trafficking but to repress and massacre the Colombian people for the benefit of criminal transnational corporations like Occidental Petroleum, Coca Cola, Drummond and Chiquita, that attack their workers, stealing the wealth of the Colombian people.

For a new world with social justice!

Raúl Reyes, Julián Conrado and all guerrilla fighters murdered on March 1, ¡Presentes!

In solidarity,

The Secretariat & National Committee of Workers World Party/Mundo Obrero (WW/MO), United States.